Interesting, Blizzard actually went further than I expected. Which is something some people are going to love, others are going to hate.

However, even Blizzard's system still lacks something that WCR offers and which I have found useful many, many times. Namely, the character histories. I am going be very interested in reading what other (big) submission makers think...

Edit: Also, neither the current or the new armory contain any information on characters that no longer exist, which is also useful to some people.

I'd agree with your points, the character histories and no longer existing (under that name) characters is a pretty big thing. Also, the level of activity is something I like this site for - whilst obviously a lot of servers aren't that well covered, the ones which are, I think get a better idea of average playerbase etc from actual ingame censuses, than from an armory profile which at best would take into account last time logged in, but no saying if they were on for 10 seconds in the last month or lots of the time.

Perhaps a combination of the two could be handy, an occasional (say weekly/monthly) armory query to get all the names/guilds (and to put a marker on profiles of no longer existing characters), but continue having the regular censuses included to highlight the detailed history, and general activity levels._________________EU-Draenor:
-- Sagart - Buinne - Eilnich - Ruire - Laidir - Tairbh - Balgair - Naomh - Dubh --

First. Can you guys maybe explain a bit what exactly the character history is ?
I'm not in to it and just want to help the website to get the best information.

Second.
In my opinion warcraftrealms was ever a stats website to look up whats going on on the warcraftrealms but ever had the problem that all datas weren't 100% accurate.
I agree with you that a combination maybe would be the best but for example my realm Blackhand and many other EU afaik haven't enough data to believe what warcraftrealms.com is saying about them.

I just hope you guys are clever enough to ty to use this chance instead of keep on using old routines because you think it had worked before. ( No offense. I don't want to offend you guys . But for example afaik Carbonite still uses his own quest database instead of using the information from Blizzard. [I think it's the same for questhelper.]
Don't know why they do that. That just flew through my head as a good example.)

That is one of my alts. As I have been censusing a fairly long time and that is my own character, the history is pretty solid... I can see when I reached what level, what guild (if any) I was in at the time, etc.

Also, though Balgair and I have honour of being the two biggest submissions makers, we don't run the site. It's up to Rollie to decide what happens to the site and the addon. In the mean time, I am going to continue collecting data. If not for anything else, then just to keep my own character histories as complete as I can.

Further more, if you read Balgair's post closely... you'll notice that she is not resisting change. Just supporting my view that what Blizzard is offering, still isn't covering all we are interested in. WCR still offers us information that we can't get elsewhere, that's all there is to it.

I would like to see both sets of data combined, use armory for the base and the mod for more indepth informaiton, of course the activity can also be read from the armory, as it says on the character pages last time updated, and characters will de-list after so many days (at least they used to)

Armory only reads activity by day, with enough submissions, we can read activity by hour.

As for the increase in numbers... that's normal for any faction going from very few submission to being more heavily censused. That's why we have data reliability levels. I have seen realms go from 0 to 4000+ with just 2 or 3 submissions. Nowadays most big realms have someone who runs at least an occasional census and most of the realms that tend to zero out are those that are less busy overall. Naturally, that rule isn't set in stone and there are some exceptions. There are also very small factions which are heavily censused.

now lets look at the Warcraft realms page for azgalor:
Total Alliance: 2,135 - 27%
Total Horde: 5,917 - 74%

Stats through armory:
Horde: 61%
Alliance: 39%

And about 250569 more characters than through census..

Some things that where mentioned here are pluspoints for census (activity) but character history for example could also be tracked through the armory from the point on where the website uses the armory and saves all data.
And you could also add old data from census to get some classic infos.

Edit:
Afaik armory still doesn't track chars that are under level 10. May be a bad thing but the good thing about it is that level 1 i-go-quick-to-a-other-realm-to-do-there-something-characters or something like that aren't tracked so that really unimportant chars don't harm the stats.

So, of those 250k more characters, how many actually play? Census only shows characters active in the last 30 days, Armory shows up to, hmm, 6 months or more? That is NOT an accurate figure from the perspective that this site is based around, which is of showing current activity. A character that logged in once 6 months ago isn't active now, and shouldn't be included in the realm stats. Also it looks as though even characters below lvl 10 are included in these results, which this site leaves out, since most are bank alts or spammers - I'm betting your 250k characters includes 5-10k minimum goldspammers in that case.

I don't claim that Census is 100% accurate (although it's pretty damn close on the more well-covered realms), but for the purpose the site is for, that is, of establishing character activity levels, it's better than the Armory. Last date seen doesn't really tell you if the character played at all or logged in for 10 sec to check mail. It certainly doesn't tell you how many people play at peak times, how many play in the mornings, what the Horde/Alliance ratio of people online at any one time may be. Yes, lesser covered realms don't have that either, but those realms which are well covered by censuses have far far more detail then what the armory could ever give on these aspects, and that is the goal of this site, or so I've always understood it._________________EU-Draenor:
-- Sagart - Buinne - Eilnich - Ruire - Laidir - Tairbh - Balgair - Naomh - Dubh --

Character activity and history tracking through armory? Excuse me while I die from laughing. To reach Censusplus like accuracy... WCR would have send out and process over 93 MILLION (and growing) queries per HOUR, 24 hours a day, minimum. Would you please tell me what sort of NASA like inventory you think WCR and Blizzard have to handle such query and processing loads, even if the site managed to send them out (which is unlikely)? The Armory servers would crash like hovels in a Texas tornado under such bombardment and the site would be banned for executing DOS attacks on Blizzard.

Even if we reversed the process... and dropped everything below level 10... well using Balgair's info as rough guideline... we would still be looking at approximately 600 (US + EU) servers times about 80 000 (to cover both sides) = roughly 48 million queries to be processed per hour.

Let's take a step further... let's just query those characters that have been seen in the past 7 days according to WCR data... We are still looking at over 1,7 (at the moment, this value has often exceeded 2,1) million queries to be sent out and processed per hour. Still too large a load... + We would already be in the data loss zone, as it's a known fact that a lot more than 1,7 million characters have been online in the past 7 days.

Oh wow I hadn't even considered the implications of that side of things, 93 million+ queries per hour? Even a once per day update would be way too much at that rate! Oh and even running hourly won't help with the players online at time of day info, since Armory only shows the date last logged in, not the time (and even if it's got the time hidden away someplace not visible, it's the time the character logged off, not the hours during which they were online)

There's maybe room (IF Rollie has time, and going on how busy he's been lately, I doubt it's likely anytime soon; I'll be happy to just have a version of the addon/website which handles Goblins and Worgen come December 7th!) to add in Armory queries as a supplement to the existing data gathering though. I have no idea how much information is realistic to be able to gather at a time before it's overloading either this site or the armory, but, say, a once per month trawl to just add new characters and update old ones which have been missed by the census, for history purposes, would seem feasible to me. But it could definitely never generate close to the detail which a well-censused server currently has, if it'll take that many queries. _________________EU-Draenor:
-- Sagart - Buinne - Eilnich - Ruire - Laidir - Tairbh - Balgair - Naomh - Dubh --

To cover both activity and changes yes, 93M+ checks in style (is presenit now?, if yes, send, process and save data) per hour.

The second method would involve a single request for all level 10+ characters present, send, process and save data, which as calculated above using your figures would produce approximately 48M incoming entries per hour, which, in my understanding, would utterly crash the site.

As a supplemental plan... the following MIGHT be feasible... use a 28 day rotation (as there are 28 possible starting alphabets for server names) and go like this: Day 1 all servers starting with A, day 2 all servers starting with B, etc... Adding the restriction level 10 to 80 (85 after Cataclysm), should drop the amount of incoming data to tolerable levels, maybe... *checks math* Hmmm... a bit over 20 servers per day on average... maybe 1,6M entries a day? Still looks like a lot. Extend rotation to 56 days and split US and EU by going: day 1, US As, day 2 EU As, day 3, US Bs, day 4, EU Bs, etc...

Maybe... so... perhaps... one overall check every 56 days per server? Not very detailed, indeed.

EDIT: Would also mean that the expiry timer on data would have to be 56 (60?) days instead of 30.

Agree there Kenny, I think this armory info could be a great way to help fill in the gaps on undercensused realms Just seems from what 1974ER is saying, that there's no way it could replace regular censusing - the mind boggles at the sheer number of queries that would be needed there to keep the data even up to date within a day, never mind to the hour, as is currently the case on the better-covered realms!

I'd definitely support adding it to our regular information gathering (in a limited way, either once per month or per two months, depending how the numbers work out), if Rollie can manage it though, as it'd certainly help significantly on realms which only tend to get 1-2 censuses per month anyway; those ones must be missing a lot of characters!_________________EU-Draenor:
-- Sagart - Buinne - Eilnich - Ruire - Laidir - Tairbh - Balgair - Naomh - Dubh --

There is indeed lots of room for improvement... but direct armory crawling isn't a viable overall solution.

There are interesting possibilities in it, though... Maybe one day we'll have a gender for all active characters... and through that... the answers to questions such as: Is the female dwarf rogue the rarest gender race class combination... or is it the female troll warrior? Or something else? Are there any level 80 (85) female goblins / worgen on my realm yet?

EDIT: I just did some recalculating... One option, which MIGHT be feasible would be to aim checking one server per hour for level 10+ characters. 25 days equals 600 hours. US and EU currently total slightly under 600 servers. So if the site and armory can handle that, we could get about 1,??? checks per server per month.

I know it isn't much, but it would ensure that almost no realm would ever zero out. Maintenance breaks or armory crashes would still cause problems, though.

I would not expect armory crawl to replace but improve due to the number of queries i would say just limit the Query to the top 5 levels (80-85) those are the biggest and most important level in my opinion, there is no need to be scanning my level 36 hunter i hop on and get a level every month or so... just use armory to get the Level capped characters or the top 5 levels those also by proxy should be the most active

Interesting idea, Azgaurd... though, given your assumption and the current state of population on almost all servers... For WCR purposes it might actually be better to query levels 10-79 (after Cataclysm 10-84) and leave the top level to manual scans.

Why am I suggesting such an action, you might ask? Well, on most realms, about 50% of characters that get seen are at level 80. And level 80s generally tend to settle in a guild and stay there. Therefore, they actually mostly just get seen, they rarely produce new data, as they no longer level up and guild changes are less frequent than among the lower levels.

Querying the part that actually gets seen the least, would improve the data the most.

Interesting idea, Azgaurd... though, given your assumption and the current state of population on almost all servers... For WCR purposes it might actually be better to query levels 10-79 (after Cataclysm 10-84) and leave the top level to manual scans.

But as some posts before said..
Using the armory is difficult in some ways. It costs ton of traffic and
may not be accepted from Blizzard.
If we just catch up the max level it might not be so much traffic that blizzard will ban the website.
So scanning one time per month only the max level chars would be effective for them and lower the amount of traffic.

Problem with that logic is there's more characters at 80 than at 10-79 right now Earlier in an expansion, yes, that'd work, but certainly not at present - http://www.warcraftrealms.com/census.php indicates 2,737,992 lvl 80s in the records and 2,195,752 10-79 characters Yes, once you go down to lvl 1 there's more again, but I doubt Rollie would do that; there's far too many unused lvl 1 alts around for it to be practical regarding database space (the site used to go down that far but hasn't for a long time due to space issues)_________________EU-Draenor:
-- Sagart - Buinne - Eilnich - Ruire - Laidir - Tairbh - Balgair - Naomh - Dubh --